SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET

Bill Aitken

A Closer Look at an Himalayan Classic
by

‘I never understood how this doctrine (of non-violence) could be reconciled with the fact that every autumn some fifteen thousand sheep are (dispatched to) the slaughterhouses of Nepal and that the Tibetans levy export duty on them.’ Heinrich Harrer in a humane aside expresses these qualms of conscience in his diary in Kyirong in January 1945, three months before the surrender of Germany. Two European fugitives from British Indian law were marooned in this Tibetan village for nine months while awaiting the decision of the Lhasa authorities on their petition for sanctuary. What stirred Harrer’s conscience were the associations that went with the holy place of Kyirong set at 9000 ft near the Nepal border. After all their windy exposure on the roof of the world, this Himalayan ‘village of happiness’’ seemed like Shangri La.

Contrary to what is widely supposed, it was this least typical part of Tibet that would have the greatest influence on the fugitives, altering the way they thought about life, especially after the collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich on which all their dreams had rested. Harrer (henceforth HH) did not edit these notings until his return to Europe in 1951 when he wrote his Seven Years in Tibet to such rave reviews that it remains with five million copies sold the best selling travel classic on the Himalaya. The blurb on my Pan edition of 1974 (fifth printing) describes the story as ‘A unique and enthralling true adventure hailed as one of the most intriguing of all time’. A closer look at the narrative however suggests, at least to HH’s detractors, the most intriguing thing about the book is that it raises some serious questions: ‘How genuine are the author’s motives for writing up this adventure?’ ‘Is it really a cover up for an Austrian Quisling to give him an alibi and save him from hanging?’

That HH was a man of destiny, there can be no doubt. His personal equation with the twentieth century’s most notorious mass murderer by proxy (Adolf Hitler) and his later friendship with the twenty-first century’s kindest person (the Dalai Lama), along with his sporting and literary achievements suggests a man of extraordinary talents, almost impossible to categorise. The jury is still out on HH’s true motives and while the world assumes the worst about his ideological preferences (aided by the stubborn lifelong refusal of HH to clear his own name), mountaineers impressed by his considerable climbing and exploring skills have always been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. In this closer look at his most famous book we must let his words speak for themselves.

Peter Fleming’s introduction to Seven Years gives a clean chit to the motives of the escapees and commends HH’s ‘simple tastes, solid standards, integrity of character, unpretentious style.’ However it is clear from the remark that ‘there was no shred of justification for HH’s presence in Lhasa’ that Fleming had not read the text closely. If he had done so he would have noted that Harrer mentions a German expedition that went to Lhasa in 1939. This implies that Germans (unlike the British) were welcome in the Forbidden City. Since the Germans were in fact Nazis of the totalitarian Third Reich, this raises the curious scenario of a supposedly Buddhist government allying itself to a tyrannical racist regime beside which Chinese Communism seems a much lesser evil. At least the latter’s declared policy was not the mass killing, enslavement and systematic starvation of those populations it deemed inferior.

Fleming also misses the nuances implicit in HH’s bluff that had fooled the abbot of Trashigang gompa when he first set foot in Tibet. HH claimed his group of escaping Europeans was ‘an advance party of a large European force that had obtained official permission to enter Tibet from the Central Government at Lhasa.’ The fact that the head lama did not doubt the truth of this claim suggests that he was well aware of the Lhasa government having invited a German delegation in 1939. HH was such an accomplished bluffer that on his eventual arrival in Lhasa the authorities admitted they thought he really might be the vanguard of an invading force.

It is helpful when reading HH to remember that when he speaks of ‘German’ ‘or ‘Germany’ ‘what he really means (but is too circumspect to say) is ‘Nazi’. There is a price to be paid for this constant resort to verbal subterfuge. Truth especially on a subliminal level is hard to suppress entirely. Thus HH’s slightly threatening tone in the phrase ‘a large European force’ means in its unadorned sense that the invitation from the Lhasa lamas had indeed been addressed to a force large in European affairs. That force was the Gestapo whose chief most surprisingly took a special interest in Tibetan affairs. That the Gestapo chief also took a close personal interest in HH and actively furthered his career is a fact that the latter chooses to be silent about. This might suggest that HH was either a coward or an ingrate but it is just as likely that he counted amongst his many accomplishments a rare skill in diplomatic tight rope walking.

It could only be the youthful HH’s enthusiasm for the Third Reich’s state-supported thuggery that explains how an Austrian outsider could find a place on the team of fervent German nationalists selected to ascend the North Face of the Eiger, especially as this was a propaganda stunt in Alpine one-upmanship to advertise the superiority of the German race. Being an underground outlawed movement no records exist of HH’s actual (if any) involvement with the Austrian brown shirt thugs who terrorized Jews and looted their homes to make the takeover of their own country easier for the Nazis in March 1938. (In one of his very few denials HH claims his membership of the brown shirts was an empty boast made to ensure Himmler would provide him with an up market Nazi wife!) But that he must have actively displayed sympathy for the trademark Nazi violence so as to impress its leadership is strongly suggested by the sudden meteoric rise in his career both as a climber and member of the Nazi party. It is interesting to note that in Lhasa HH would enjoy training the Dob-Dobs, a corps of militant monks characterised by a bullying disposition.

HH’s character seems to have a Faustian dimension in throwing up all the drama inherent in the struggle between good and evil. As a public hero of the Third Reich, destiny served him well by physically distancing him from the worst excesses of his unspeakable party colleagues. The silence HH would retain in public about his own early politics was not broken till the end of his long life. Bitterly for him just when it seemed he had finally triumphed over his critics, an indiscreet comment about Chinese totalitarianism in a film version of Seven Years in Tibet snatched away his cup of joy. Even then admission of his Nazi involvement had to be dragged out of him from commercial compulsions and was tersely worded by a lawyer to convey little or no remorse.

His bland and (for obvious reasons) self-censored preface to Seven Years rues the fact that in 1936 being an Austrian alpinist who was neither wealthy nor British he would be unable to climb in the Himalaya. Then apparently out of the blue he was called to the telephone and invited to join an expedition to Nanga Parbat led by Peter Aufschnaiter. Embarrassingly for HH (and explaining why he does not spell out who had phoned to offer him the expedition berth), the voice on the line was that of his Godfather, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo. Destiny (or the disturbed devil of the Eiger?) had again rolled its dice. HH had been adopted by the most famous psychopath in the annals of western civilization

Nowhere in his writing does the young handpicked pupil of the evil genius Himmler, disclose the fact he became a member of the Nazi party just six weeks after the March 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria. His critics in Beijing quoting the Berlin archives claim that his good work roughing up political opponents as a stormtrooper in 1933 had endeared him so much to Hitler that following HH’s Eiger success in July 1938 he was promoted as instructor to train a ski corps (according to HH) or crack troops to implement the Final Solution (according to Beijing.) There is no dispute over his marriage in December 1938 His wife was chosen and the ceremony (after which HH claims he never wore his SS uniform again) was arranged by Himmler. It involved the Herrenvolk (master race) protocol of both bride and groom submitting to medical tests to certify that their Aryan genes had not been contaminated by Semitic inputs. The world would never have known of these details except for the German mania to record everything in writing. The Nazi archives were captured by the American forces and HH’s dossier complete with his handwriting is now in the public domain.

As the hero of the Eiger and blue-eyed boy of the master race headed for Asia, HH modestly promises ‘I shall content myself with the unadorned facts’ .Herein lies the problem with much of his writing. The reader sometimes suspects that by unadorned facts what he really means is being economical with the truth. The author`s trans-Himalayan journey to Lhasa is full of contradictions that range from the philosophical to the pecuniary. One of the most laboured themes is HH’s constant reference to the indignity of being put behind barbed wire. He cleverly harnesses this sense of outrage against the human spirit to justify the ‘cunning and stratagem’ he and his companion Aufschnaiter employ successfully to further their journey.

This familiar Nazi pattern of preaching one thing and practicing the opposite is noticeable even in the mundane daily budgeting. Forever complaining of lack of money HH nevertheless can afford to buy a succession of yaks and even loans money on his way to Lhasa. His explanation that other interned Nazis had offered him gold only strengthens the belief that the Gestapo was the source of such largesse. It is a gruesome footnote to the Nanga Parbat expedition that the Gestapo paid for it from gold systematically extorted from the Jewish community or extracted from their teeth in the gas chambers where the Nazis deceitful to the very end played piped music of Viennese waltzes.

Some have argued that the Nanga Parbat expedition was a front and that the Nazi members were expected to infiltrate into Tibet to continue the 1939 search for a pure Aryan race. Certainly it is curious how the German escapees who would have been issued silver rupees for their expedition to the Indian Himalaya came to possess gold which was the only acceptable currency for travel in Tibet. Also it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Nazi escapees were carrying a seal of safe passage. It is strange that even famous explorers like Hedin could not get past the district officials whose life was forfeit if foreigners reached Lhasa.

The overdone freedom refrain in Seven Years may be residual evidence of Himmler’s baleful tutelage in deception As late as 1946 HH continues to flaunt the red herring of the pressing need to stay outside the barbed wire of British internment camps. The fact of the matter is that HH could have been a free man in 1943 when the British authorities in the Dehra Dun camp offered him amnesty as an Austrian citizen. All that was required was for HH to formally denounce Nazi ideology. If he had really wanted freedom he could have been repatriated to his homeland immediately.

Since HH never mentions the amnesty option we conclude he must have his private reasons both for hiding the fact from his readers and for turning it down to remain a captive These may have been noble in not wanting to desert his Nazi companions or ignoble in fearing the consequences of possibly being denounced as a Quisling back home. To strengthen the latter suspicion, when events on the Chinese mainland compelled HH to leave Tibet in 1951, he did not go home directly to Austria but settled in a neighbouring principality. He would return to Austria only after the fame and fortune accruing from his Seven Years best seller gave him sufficient respectability and social clout to withstand the criticism of patriotic Austrians who accused him of having betrayed his country’s freedom to the jack boots of the German Nazi regime.

Fear of the charge of treason may have determined HH’s decision to remain in Asia especially when his mountaineering associate Dr Seyss-Inquart, Nazi governor of Austria and chairman of the notoriously anti-Semitic continental versions of the Alpine Club, was hanged by the Nuremberg tribunal in October1946. In January of that year on arrival in Lhasa while going through old newspapers HH would write: ‘the news was not precisely exhilarating. Our country was going through hard times.’

Guilt may be the reason for HH’s obsessive need to wave the flag of freedom where even the wild asses on the roof of the world are not immune from the author’s compulsive musings on the subject. Seven Years ends with HH chiding the world for its indifference to Tibet’s loss of freedom but such pious protestations coming from an erstwhile Nazi inflates humbug to bursting point. Is this posturing part of an exercise to convince himself after the collapse of the Third Reich that freedom is indeed something to be enjoyed by all peoples and not just the master race?

Racial superiority was one of the main planks of Nazi ideology and Himmler ran a research institute to enquire into this pseudo-scientific concept. (The institute would later be renamed after the great explorer of Tibet, Sven Hedin who was a confirmed Nazi and confidant of Adolf Hitler.) Tibet according to the bizarre beliefs of the Nazi leadership was rumoured to harbour a remnant of pure Aryans.

As it happens James Hilton`s best selling book The Lost Horizon that made the Shangri La idea known to the western reader was published the year the Nazis came to power. It appears that Hilton’s depiction of eternal youth as symbolic of spiritual grace was taken by the literal minded Teutons to be a physical reality that would bestow long life to the Aryan race and guarantee a thousand year tenure to Hitler’s Third Reich. To breed blonde Aryans the Nazis needed specimens of this long lived race of supposed super-beings and Himmler was not averse to kidnapping them (or any other pure Nordic type) if necessary. He had provided for the impregnation of pure Aryan womenfolk by seconding SS officers for this purpose to designated hospices in the Alps.

The Nazi expedition of 1939 was sent by the Gestapo chief to locate the imagined lost race. On returning to Europe its ghoulish deputy leader Bruno Berger, a close friend of HH, would achieve notoriety with his anthropological experiments on the skeletons of Auschwitz victims. Some skulls of corpses excavated on the Ukrainian front were found to have holes drilled in them. The Nazis apparently took the eastern teaching of the Third Eye literally as a physical organ. In one of the several ironies that follow HH’s career, he alerted a British publisher to the false claims made in the best selling book The Third Eye by a British plumber who passed himself off as a Tibetan initiate called Lobsang Rampa. In the 1950s, Tibet and its mystic mumbo jumbo was the flavour of the month.

In a lifetime of literary evasions, Harrer’s excellent history of the Eiger (The White Spider) finds him caught red-handed telling a lie. Denying the Nazi inspiration of the first ascent of the Nordwand the master bluffer affects amnesia, referring to Hitler obliquely as ‘some personage or the other.’ The reality was that there were thirty thousand witnesses to the fact that HH was personally felicitated at Breslau by Adolf Hitler and that the ‘beloved Fuhrer’ posed for a photograph with HH and the other Nazi heroes after their Eiger ascent.

HH`s fatal mistake lay not in resort to the brazen lie but in failing to grasp when his reputation was unassailable the opportunity to apologise for his Nazi affiliation. When Seven Years in Tibet had been written it was too near the raw memories and open wounds of war atrocities (committed not just by the Nazis). But in The White Spider any expression of regret for his youthful indiscretions would have been readily forgiven. Combined with his Eiger climbing achievement his valorous voyage into the hinterland of Tibet bestowed on him the lineaments of a truly great explorer. Unfortunately his stubbornness led many to assume that his silence must mean guilt.

Those who argue that HH’s espousal of the Buddhist faith prove him to have been a changed man are, like Fleming, guilty of not reading HH’s own words on the subject. HH’s affair with Buddhism appears to have been a matter of open eyed convenience. While alive to the faith and poetry of the ceremonies he could not ignore the ground realities. His eyewitness description of the monks of Sera preparing to pillage the rich homes of Lhasa and the employment of howitzers to bombard the revolutionary monastery into submission, hardly matches up to the world’s idea of what the Buddha taught.

The Tibetan government’s flirtation with the Nazi totalitarian regime, had it not been such a well guarded secret till HH happened along, would have shocked the world much more. The acute embarrassment it caused the Dalai Lama when he came to occupy the Potala throne did not affect the pontiff’s friendship with HH. This suggests the author of Seven Years despite his sinister associations also has much to recommend him. HH is fair minded enough to note in his last observations before leaving Tibet that the Red Guards initially behaved towards the local population with great restraint

For HH his ‘Road to Damascus’ occurred in Kyirong. On hearing the war had ended adversely for the Nazis, there was no blinding light but it does appear there were reversed perceptions. Realising that all the weird and wicked fantasies of the Third Reich had turned to ashes, HH though he would be haunted by his shattered beliefs for the rest of his life (and would have his reputation destroyed by his inability to acknowledge them) vowed to go by an impossible route to Lhasa rather than opt for the easy road back to Kathmandu and possible questioning in Europe. As a former instructor he had presumably not been paid by the SS to teach hymns to the Vienna Boys Choir.

Disillusionment with the defeat of Hitler and the destruction of the Third Reich dream of world domination forced him to adopt an outwardly new identity. The prospect of retailing to a fascinated international audience inside information on the exotic rituals of Mahayana Buddhism was an opportunity not to be missed and all credit to HH for doing it so brilliantly as to seemingly reinvent himself. Rather than Tibetan Buddhist doctrine however it was Himalayan beauty that bewitched him. Nine months at the holy site of Kyirong effected a turning point in his thinking. The innocent paradise he had lost on the Eiger by prostituting his talents to advertise an evil empire was now regained. As he entered on the horrendous journey across the Khampa-infested winter wastes of the Changthang plateau, HH felt the same feeling in the pit of his stomach that he had experienced before tackling the Nordwand.

‘All my life I have been a seeker though the final answer to the riddle of life has not been vouchsafed to me.’ This frank assessment coming from the favourite disciple of Himmler reveals remarkable honesty and a new-found humility. Considering that his Gestapo guru had relished the slaughter of six million human beings to further the Nazi ‘Final Solution,’ it is heartening to read that Heinrich Harrer had liberated himself from his past. The proof, though modest, is declared in his compassionate concern for the fate of fifteen thousand sheep

SUMMARY

A look at the Himalayan classic book.